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V-Day post-mortem
Despite the chaos surrounding it, I'd say we had a better Valentine's Day dinner than we had any right to expect. I mean, if we'd actually made reservations for the high-priced hibachi restaurant we went to, then I might have been upset about it, but since we were already flying by the seat of our pants, the night ended up being a pretty good experience.
After our 2-hour rendezvous with the internet, we caught a movie (Coraline in 3D, which we enjoyed), and headed to Sawa in Monroeville, a Japanese hibachi steak house. We'd been there before and liked the food as well as the entertainment that the chef provides. When we arrived at 6:50 to become part of the huge crowd massing around the hostess station, where only a single hostess was clearly overworked as she dashed back and forth between seating people, counting open seats, and screaming out patron numbers to those waiting to be seated. She barely had time to take down our names and tell us that it would be an hour and a half wait for a hibachi table but only 25 minutes for a regular dining table. As we've seen the thing before, we decided we could make do with the food, so we signed up for the latter and left. We checked out a nearby fish place that was more expensive and had a similar wait, then putzed around at Barnes and Noble until 20 of the allotted 25 minutes had passed. It was, in fact, almost precisely 25 minutes after we put our names in that our number was called, which might have led us to believed that we were in the midst of a well-oiled piece of restaurant machinery.
That illusion wouldn't last long. We, #68, were taken back with #67, a party of four. We were taken to a hibachi table (!) with only four seats (?). The other folks were seated and we were apologetically taken back to the holding pens. Perhaps 10 minutes later we were taken with a party of four and a party of seven to a table that could hold 12 people. I'm not sure if they don't know how many chairs are at their own tables or if they can't do basic math, but the party of 7 ended up being split. And we were still at a hibachi table, and still not dumb enough to insist that we'd only asked for a regular table. If they can't keep track of who's to get an inferior table, so be it.
They came to take our orders and we got some appetizers--edamame for us both, sashimi for me and a sushi roll for Lauren--and hibachi dinners. One of our neighboring diners (at the hibachi table, you basically share a big table/grill with up to 11 other people) took great pains to explain that she had a shellfish allergy, a caution which seemed largely ignored. Eventually our chef came out, double-checked all of our hibachi orders, and... found himself stymied by the fact that our hibachi wasn't turned on. It's hard to cook on a cold stove, so he turned it on and left with his cart full of food (which one of our fellow diners was about willing to eat raw if he'd been permitted). Eventually, we got a different chef, who proceded to entertain us with implement percussion, egg spinning and tossing, food flipping, onion volcano-ing, and all the other tricks of the trade. Oddly enough, no one tried to entertain us with our appetizers until our main courses were almost complete--my rice, shrimp, and steak had all been served, so only the people who chose the fowlest of meals hadn't been served, and none of us yet had our veggies. Oh, and one of the customers was five shrimp shy of his meal. Evidently, these things happen. The only appetizers we got, however, were our sushi and sashimi, no edamame. Still, it was a good meal.
Considering how nonchalant the chef seemed to be about the proximity of the shrimp and the chicken, we'd probably have to call any meal where the woman next to us didn't go into convulsions a pretty good one. Except that, actually, she did go into convulsions, or anyway something like convulsions when the waitress spilled ice water in her lap. But she didn't die, so I'm counting that as a win.
As we got to talking with our fellow diners, it turned out that they'd all made reservations in advance, and I admitted that we hadn't. Fortunately, my self-preservation instinct kicked in before I told these people who had 7 o'clock reservations that we'd gotten there 10 minutes before their reservation time and then sat down with them at 7:40. "Oh um, I'm not sure how long we waited. We just put our name in and then went shopping. It was probably an hour..." They still don't look happy at with our comparative suffering... "and a half. Or more."
When our meal was finally finished, they seemed in no hurry to move us through. It was almost as if they didn't have a lobby that was just as full at 9 p.m. as it had been at 7. It took them forever to get our bills to us and then they had to correct ours since they were still charging us for phantom edamame. I thought the waitress was going to pop an artery, she was so stressed out. As funny as anything else was the message at the bottom of our receipt encouraging us to "Make your reservations for Valentine's Day today!" At least they weren't asking us to plan any further ahead than they had....